the food material decreases as the removal of water proceeds
during dehydration (the thermal conductivity of water is much larger
than that of the macromolecules of food), the results of this
work show that food dehydration further strengthens the interaction
energies and lowers the aw values of the remaining water molecules.
Consequently, the difficulty of removing water molecules
from the deeper regions of the food materials would increase as
dehydration progresses. Thus, one could use the quantitative information
that our theoretical approach provides to design an engineering
control system that can supply at any given time the
appropriate amount of heat during food dehydration so that the
amount of time required for dehydration can be minimized, and
this could also have beneficial effects for the stability and quality
of the dehydrated food material.